1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to cluster architecture. More specifically, the invention relates to a star topology cluster architecture for application servers.
2. Background
Traditionally, each instance in a cluster of application servers maintains a direct communication link with each other instance. In the cluster, as used herein, instance refers to a unit in the cluster, which can be started, stopped, and monitored separately from other units in the cluster. As the cluster becomes increasingly large, the overhead associated with maintaining the communication link from each instance to every other instance becomes quite burdensome. Resulting performance problems have created a real constraint on cluster size. Additionally, to maintain the homogeneity of the cluster, large amounts of data are replicated and passed around the cluster over these myriad communication links. This overhead severely impacts the scalability of such cluster architectures.